Biography Society Seminar

Gregorio Marañón with Carlyle and Emerson: the ‘Relevant Event’ in the Pedagogical Development of Human Beings and Humankind

Gregorio Marañón defines the ‘relevant event’ as one which implies a transformation or change in the life trajectory of the biographical subject. He elaborates a concept of the relationship between man and humanity on a Diltheyan basis. He establishes a similarity between the personal evolutionary process and the history of man. Marañon’s ‘relevant event’ will be examined with special reference to Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes & Hero-Worship and R. W. Emerson’s Representative Men, in so far as these three authors can be seen as successors of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften.

16h

Floriane Reviron-Piegay

Université de Saint-Étienne (CELEC)

Lytton Strachey, André Maurois and the New Biography: French evolution versus English revolution?

The purpose of this presentation is to assess André Maurois’s contribution to the Revolution of the New Biography and more precisely Lytton Strachey’s influence on Maurois. André Maurois prefaced the French translation of Eminent Victorians and commented on Strachey’s breakthrough in biography at length in Aspects of Biography or in Prophets and Poets. An anglophile and English-speaking man, Maurois was to spread Strachey’s ideas about biography in fictional biographies of his own (Ariel or the Life of Shelley, Disraeli, ByronPrometheus: The Life of Balzac), and in theoretical essays. Keeping in mind the text written by Harold Bloom upon The Anxiety of Influence, it is the extent of this “influence” that we would like to analyse by looking at the way these texts were written and spread, interpreted and received both in France and in Great-Britain.

16h30

Discussion

17h

Craig Howes

University of Hawai’i (Center for Biographical Research, CBR)

How Soon Can A Point Turn? Childhood, Psychoanalysis, and Biography

One of the commonplaces of the history of biography is that psychoanalysis marks a turning point in its practice. Freud himself made this claim; Strachey and Nicolson were early acolytes of sorts; Erikson, Edel, Sartre, and others became its heirs and its theorists; and in 2007, Nigel Hamilton refers to Freud’s claim as “a historic declaration.” This paper evaluates how this revolution has influenced the representation of turning points in lives. One of the major impacts of psychoanalysis on biography was its insistence on how early, profoundly, and irrevocably a life can turn. This led biographers to examine the subject’s childhood far more closely, and frequently to speculate about turning points that “must” have happened to explain the life’s later course. But to what extent do recent biographies sustain, call into question, or ignore the imperative to locate turning points in the earliest years of a life—and more specifically, in lives that are themselves seen as turning points in the history of science and technology?

Theo van Doesburg’s De Stijl and Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST: Revolutionary Journals of the International Avant-Garde

About the De Stijl, the movement and the magazine of the same name, a lot has been published, even last year when the centenary of its creation in 1917, a month after the Bolshevist October revolution in Russia, received unprecedented attention in the Netherlands, and in the rest of the world. Theo van Doesburg, the founder of De Stijl, propagated Neo-Plasticism, like Wyndham Lewis and BLAST supported Vorticism in Britain. Rarely, however, has the relationship been established between this new visual language and the striving for the de-individualization of De Stijl. Even though Theo van Doesburg felt that politics was ‘non-modern’, the political implications of De Stijl, like those of BLAST, cannot be denied. In this paper, it becomes clear when and how Van Doesburg, to some extent like Wyndham Lewis, unleashed a revolution in the arts.

10h

David Veltman

University of Groningen

Carry On Quietly: how the Flemish avant-garde was inspired by the Irish liberation movement

During the First World War, many modernist artists in Flanders were collaborating with the German occupier. Inspired by the Irish liberation movement Sinn Féin, they wanted to liberate Flanders from the dominance of a French-speaking elite. Victor Servranckx, Felix de Boeck and Prosper de Troyer, for example, worked together at the artist’s society of Doe Stil Voort [Carry On Quietly], funded by the Germans. They envisaged a revolution leading to a ‘New World’, based upon the rational choices and clear language that they used in their abstract art. The return of heavily wounded soldiers from the Flemish battlefields could be seen as a turning point in De Boeck’s life. What was started as a collective revolutionary struggle, became an individual sympathy for the German occupier. Whereas Sinn Féin succeeded in forming a militant political party, the Flemish avant garde did not. What where the historical reasons that stalled this revolution?

10h30

Discussion

Atelier III

Samedi 9, 9h-10h30

Salle V402

9h

Olivier Frayssé

Paris-Sorbonne Université (HDEA)

Was Abraham Lincoln a revolutionist?

This paper will explore one of the issues that have divided Lincoln scholars: was president Lincoln a conservative or a revolutionist? The Lincoln presidency is justly famous for the abolition of slavery, which led several historians, from Charles A. Beard to James McPherson, to label the Civil War “a second American Revolution”. If it really was, then was Lincoln an enthusiastic or a reluctant revolutionist? The question expands when considering the significant changes brought about by the Lincoln presidency in the realms of federal power and executive privilege, the financial organization and economic policies of the nation, and becomes trickier when the issue of race relations is squarely addressed. What were the interpretative hypotheses that led biographers to give conflicting answers to these questions?

The Invention of Angela Carter: The Danger of Canonizing an Iconoclastic Author

Angela Carter’s life and writing are inextricably linked to the feminist and the countercultural movements of the 1960’s. In “Notes from The front Line” Carter confirms the role of the sixties in shaping her identity and her writing. Carter’s fiction and essays insist on the social and discursive construction of the identity. Her feminist and countercultural engagements foreground her representation of the subject as invention. This paper will examine the extent to which Edmund Gordon’s biography captures the dialogue between the author and the feminist and countercultural dynamics of her times and reflects the iconoclastic attitude of the author. Other related questions concern the composition of the biography itself: does the biography respect the demythologizing business in which the author was engaged or does it contribute into mythologizing the author like many obituaries did soon after Carter’s death? To what extent is the biography in keeping with the revolutionary spirit and style of the author?

Rarely endowed with revolutionary potential, the biopic (« biographical moving picture ») has often been regarded as a marginal or « malign » cinematographic sub/genre. However, despite persisting narrative and typological patterns in the filmic rewriting of the lives of « larger-than-life characters », some of these immensely popular films foreground the radical, to a large extent still unexplored capacity of the biopic to reconstruct an exceptional character in film. This paper proposes a brief exploration of the innovative portrayals of Allen Ginsberg in Howl (Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, 2010) and Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007). After contrasting these films inspired by the life of a well-known American poet and an even better-known singer-poet with more classic poet biopics, we shall see to what extent the two films seek to challenge the canonic retelling of a life. Of particular interest is the way the filmmakers draw on multiple sources during their filmic attempt to recreate an emblematic individual capable of incarnating an entire era.

12h30

Discussion

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES

The word ‘life’ is constantly revolving around the axis of writing: a life is both a biography and its topic. In a sense, we write our lives as we live them. Lives that go on being written after the death of the subject, lives that are considered interesting enough to be written and read about are often closely related to a paradigmatic shift, a revolution of one sort or another. Whether the individuals are the indispensable agents of such revolutionary moments, or simply happened to be in the right place at the right moment, is a sensitive case in point. Furthermore, in the ‘structure’ of a human life – this dated word should be understood in the broadest possible sense of what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) – time is heterogeneous: there are ‘turning points’, or moments of higher intensity, which are interesting to study as such, as well as for their two-way impact on individual lives and their contexts, but also for their incidence on the composition of biographies. Under the influence of the cinema, some modern biographies focus on particularly significant moments or periods in the lives they relate. Such ‘partial’ biographies are one instance of formal innovation in a genre that is often criticized for its conventionality, yet there have been other revolutionary experiments in biography, as for example Ruth Scurr’s recent John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015), written out like a diary, in the first-person singular. This seminar would welcome contributions proposing theoretical reflections or case studies in history, literature and cinema, on one or the other of these three heads: how individual lives relate to historical or paradigmatic revolutions, the nature and impact of ‘turning points’ in human lives, or innovations in the evolution of biography as a genre. The article versions of the presentations will afterwards be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal with the permission of their authors. Proposals of no more than 200 words, in French or in English, with short biographical notes, should be sent before 15 January 2018 to Joanny Moulin and Patrick Di Mascio.